Stephen Donaldson
The Runes of the Earth

Linden Avery is a smalltown doctor with a secret. Ten years ago she witnessed the murder of a leper who claimed he had visited a fantastic land where his white gold wedding ring is a powerful talisman, mud heals wounds, pottery can be fixed with song, wood burns without consumption and the people are so attuned to their world that they can see health.

Ten years ago a group of fanatics kidnapped his wife. He and Linden followed them to a forest clearing behind his house. When they threaten to sacrifice her, Covenant intervenes and gets a knife in his chest. He falls into the bonfire they lit and Linden falls too, striving to save him.

As they fall, they find themselves translated into Covenants Land, but it's not the Land he remembers. The natural Law which made The Land magical has been destroyed by the Land's enemy, Lord Foul the Despiser, and a horriffic corruption of the natural order which the people call the Sunbane pervades The Land.

Covenant is outraged and leads a quest to beat the Sunbane and vanquish Lord Foul once and for all. For months he and Linden strive to complete his quest, with Giants, malevolent spirits, superhuman guardians for companions and Lord Foul's minions, the incorporeal Ravers harrying them, poisoning Covenant and sparking a reaction which causes him to tap into the elusive Wild Magic in his ring, the use of which jeopardises the whole of existence. All the while, he and Linden strive to come to terms with the fact that, in the real world, he is already dead.

Linden is traumatised by everything she sees, being the only person in The Land who has "health sense". She is tortured by the sickness she sees and seduced by the deep love Covenant demonstrates for The Land.

Linden learns that she too is capable of great power within the land and after Covenant sacrifices himself in one final battle with Lord Foul, she uses her healing skills and Land-born power to banish the Sunbane and rescue The Land. As Covenant dies, she is sent back to the real world, to be confronted with Covenant's corpse and the mutilated members of the cult which killed him.

Ten years pass.

Covenant's wife has been sent insane by the events surrounding his murder. After his eighteenth birthday, Covenant's son returns to claim her from the hospital where she had been held. After talking to him, Linden realises that he somehow knows all about The Land and that he intends to attempt to travel there. He abducts his mother and Linden's adopted son, who was a child member of the cult that killed his father.

He returns to the place of his father's murder, with Linden and the police in pursuit. There's a standoff and a shootout while a thunderstorm rages around the sacrificial altar where Covenant was killed. His son is gunned down just as lightning hits the alter. A bullet hits Linden in the chest and as she falls, she is taken to The Land, where she learns that not only has Covenant's son been taken, but his insane wife, who still holds her own white gold wedding ring, but Linden's son too. With nothing but a madman and her memories to guide her, she sets off to find her son and to confront Lord Foul, who taunts her through his possession of her companion and who is holding Covenant's wife captive, making use of her madness and her ring to ravage the land with strange destructive vortexes.

I've read and re-read the first two Chronicles many times and love the story. I've looked forward to this book for a long time. And I want so dearly to not say that it was a disappointment. But I think it was.

It's not so much that this book contains so many changes as to make The Land unrecognisable. It just takes so damn long to get going. In the first chronicles, Covenant takes a chapter to get brought to The Land, while in Runes, Donaldson has taken meticulous care to set up an intricate and convoluted explanation why and how four people get transported.

In fact, "meticulous" and "intricate" could be the best words to describe this book. The plot is flabby with vast tracts of explanation and exposition. He spends so much time explaining the convoluted history he wove in the first six books that the progression of events is brought to a crawl.

I can accept that this is the first book in a four book series and that I really can't make a true judgement on how well it works until I can read all four books back-to-back, but while it left me wanting to read the next book, it also left me frustrated and unfulfilled due to the chugging pace and (to me, anyway) uneccessary over-explanation.

I want to like it. I can't say "enjoy" because the very nature of Thomas Covenant and Linden Avery preclude enjoyment. I think once I've read it a few more times and allowed the subtleties of the plot to sink in that I might get to like it, but for now, I need to sit down and digest it once again while probably taking notes.

This is not a good book to start with. If you haven't read the previous two Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, this book won't work at all for you. And unfortunately, if you have read them, you'll find it just as unfulfilling as I did.

All I can say is "Roll on the next three books".